What Do They Speak in Afghanistan?

Dari and Pashto are the two major, official languages of Afghanistan, and are even siblings in the Iranian subfamily of Indo-European languages. One, says John McWhorter, is “disarmingly approachable” while the other is “deliciously intimidating.” *FULL TRANSCRIPT* WHAT DO PEOPLE SPEAK IN AFGHANISTAN? From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and here is our question for this episode. What do they speak in Afghanistan? Notice my melody. I put Afghanistan on the low pitch. I didn't say, what do they speak in Afghanistan? I don't mean that precisely. I mean, what do they speak in Afghanistan? The low pitch means that it's a concept that we already know. And by that I mean that we know why I'm talking about Afghanistan and that the reasons are extremely unfortunate. But because this is a language podcast, it occurs to me that we might want to cover, among all the sorts of things that we're thinking about Afghanistan, what is it that the locals there speak? What do they speak in Afghanistan? You might reasonably suppose that it's Arabic. If I were a layman, I think that's the first thing that I would think. As a matter of fact, I remember when the Taliban first started making the news a good long time ago, I kind of wondered what language is all of that taking place in? And it isn't anything that kept me awake at night, but I didn't know as much of the time and I thought Arabic, I guess. But if you're looking at scenes in Afghanistan, no, they're not speaking Arabic, but then they're not speaking Afghan or Afghani either. Properly, there is no such language. You might think there was because, say, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan. In Turkmenistan, they speak Turkmen, among other things. In Kazakhstan, they speak the language Kazakh. But it's not always like that. So, for example, in Pakistan — our sister podcast Banished, which is hosted by Amna Khalid happens to come to mind — Aman Khalid is Pakistani. Originally, she speaks not some language called Paki, which doesn't exist to my knowledge. She speaks Urdu. She doesn't speak Paki. Same thing with Afghanistan. There is no Afghani language. Noticed that you've never heard of it. Have you ever heard anybody say, well, my original language was Afghan? There's a reason, there is no language like that. And that's because there are two main languages in Afghanistan. And, you know, we can go through our whole lives and never hear them if we don't happen to be people who live in Afghanistan or somewhere close to it. The two languages are Dari and Pashto, Dari and Pashto. Most people in Afghanistan, whatever they spoke on their mama's knee, speak Dari. About half of the population of Afghanistan speak Pashto. A great many people, of course, speak both. And there are other languages. But the big two, the official ones and the ones that almost anybody knows one of and quite possibly both are Dari and Pashto. And what in the world are those? I would say that I've met one Dari speaker in my life and I'm pretty sure I have never met anybody who spoke Pashto, not in any real way. And yet millions and millions and millions of people speak these two languages. What are they? As it happens, they come from the same linguistic family, technically subfamily. And as it happens, the two languages teach us a lesson because they're on opposite poles of the family in terms of an interesting contrast in the ways that languages can be languages. So let's take a look at Dari and Pashto, because that's what the people who we’re seeing in the news are speaking. They're not speaking Arabic. MILLIONS OF AFGHANS SPEAK DARI Dari is Persian. I think we all know where Persian is spoken, in terms of its central location, but there are two other places that have truly massive numbers of speakers of Persian. It's just that it isn't called that there. So if you're speaking Persian in Afghanistan, it's called Dari. If you're speaking Persian in Tajikistan, then it's called Tajik. But Persian, Dari and Tajik are the same language. They are different dialects of the same language. No one would call them separate languages. They're all Persian. Of course, there are differences in vocabulary from place to place, differences in pronunciation, and sometimes a little bit more than that. But they are all the Persian language. It's a little lesson in how languages and nations do not have perfectly corresponding boundaries. Persian is spoken in a big giant splotch, and Iran is only one place where it's spoken. All languages, unless they're very small, are bundles of dialects. And so unless the language only has, say, a few million speakers, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to be spoken the same way in place A as it is in place B, and then there's going to be a different flavor of it in place C. Sometimes these different dialects will have different names. And so, for example, I've mentioned on this show and in many other places that really, in perfectly objective eyes, if no one knew anything about geography or history, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are one language you might call mainland Scandinavian. But for various reasons of history and culture, they are called the three separate languages of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. So we have Persian, Dari and Tajik. They are all the same basic thing. And Persian, or Dari or Tajik, is interesting because it is a disarmingly streamlined language if you're trying to learn it. It's truly surprising to encounter Persian, or if you encounter it in its Dari or Tajik form, it's the same thing, and to find that you don't have the challenge that you associate with learning just about any other language that you've had to deal with. And so I remember way back before I knew anything about Persian, in the mid 90s, there was an elderly gentleman who was caught in the rain outside of my apartment. What you do is you let that gentleman in and what you do when you have absolutely nothing in common with someone, if you're me, is that you see what language they speak originally if you notice that they speak English with an accent. Turned out that he was a Persian speaker. And so we just started talking about how his language worked because I was genuinely interested. And that was about all we were going to manage a conversation with, given what looked like was going to be a long time because he had locked himself out of the apartment next door. DARI (OR PERSIAN) IS A “DISARMINGLY APPROACHABLE” LANGUAGE So the first thing that I noticed is that this language doesn't have gender. Like, of course, there can be a difference between a bull and a cow, but it doesn't have that business of silly gender that so many European languages and beyond have. No, you know, hat is masculine and moon is feminine, like in Spanish, just none of that at all. IT just struck me as unusual, given that Persian is an Indo-European language. It was different. But, you know, we all have our quirks. You never know what's going to happen. I, for example, I don't own a single hat, never have. Not since I was a kid when people would impose them on me. I don't wear hats. I'm not afraid of them, but I don't think I look very good in them. And I have never found myself thinking, oh, goodness, my head sure is cold. It's not my head that gets cold, it's my fingers, etc. So I don't own a hat. That's my quirk. Well, Persian doesn't have the gender, but then it kind of went on. So I said, well how do you do the plural? And he said, well often you don't. And so I was thinking, well what do you mean? Because an Indo-European language usually is quite anal about saying that you're not seeing leaf on the trees, you're seeing leaves, even though the chances of you only seeing one damn leaf on a tree are very small, you have to say leaves. And some of you may know that if you go beyond Indo-European, languages often are not that persnickety about plural. If you're doing Chinese or Japanese, you see leaf on the trees. Only if you're really being picky are you going to say that you see leaves because it's so obvious. Usually you mark something with plural when it's either human or when it's definite, and you really need to specify that there's more than one. That's the way a great many languages are. You don't have to be as draconian about marking that there's more than one of something that there almost always is in a great many languages beyond Indo-European. But all of a sudden you have Persian acting like it's Chinese or Japanese. And you might think, well, there's something about the air in Asia or something like that. But no, I knew that there was something really unusual when we started doing the verbs, and so what you want to know is how you conjugate verbs and you're thinking it's going to be like Spanish with the hablar. Why can't I use an accent, hablar “to speak,” comer “to eat” — COMER — and then vivir “to live.” You have to have those three classes and the endings are kind of different. So I'm just waiting for that because it would pass the time, because it kept raining and raining. And so I buy, mikharam, okay. You buy, mikhari, okay. He, she, it buys, mikharad, okay. And you just had these, these endings, so boom boom boom. Okay, that's good. Now what's, is there another flavor. That's buy. But what about one where it's going to be like instead of am, i, ad, it's going to be something like em, e ed, you know because all languages are going to be like Spanish. And he said no, that's it. And I said, well yeah, how about the past? You know, and the past is usually, you know, some s**t show in a language of this family. And well, mikharam, that's “I buy.” Now then “khar” is the “buy,” the “mi,” you drop that off. And so, “kha,” and then if it's “I bought,” you say “kharidam.” So it's that same “am” from “I buy,” mikharam, but you stick an “id” in between the verb and that ending. So kharidam,